SEO Tools: Pros and Cons
SEO Software: Pros and Cons
One of the popular trends in a nowadays SEO is a tendency to avoid utilizing automated SEO tools. It is even said that using automated tools can hurt your search engine positions. On the other hand, search engine optimization is one of those undustries where the volume of boring routine tasks is immense. Performing all of it by hand is much more difficult and is a time-waste. So in this article we will split different SEO software into groups basing on its purpose and will try to decide which actions can be performed by hand indeed, and which ones are better to apply automatically.
1) Content creation. There are a lot of products that supply automatic synonymizing of any text. There are ones that even claim to create human-readable site content produced 100% automatically. Obviously, until computers will start to understand the sense of a text, they won’t be able to provide a more or less good automated content. That is why this task should be performed 99% manually for now. Hire a good copywriter and make a quality content for your site, rather than putting those funds into some “advanced” tool that does this automatically.
2) Gaining backlinks. This is the second crucial SEO task, though somebody could name it the first. A quality link building requires you to overview hundreds of possible linking partners and filtering only those sites that are closely related to your one, with a quality text and a trust rank at the same time. This task can be made automatic a little, since you don’t have to locate potential linking sites manually. However, the final conclusion still is upon you. It is you who should check the quality of websites and judge their relevance to your theme. Finding link partners is merely 10% of a job. The rest is performed manually.
3) Monitoring search engine rankings. In short, you want this to track your efforts – whether you’re doing right, or your activity doesn’t hit the target. One of the biggest mistakes with this task is checking the search engine positions to the “bottom”, i.e. up to the 1000th position. In most cases you don’t need that amount. If your website isn’t located within the first 20-30 positions – nobody sees it anyway. So in a SEO practice it is better to limit web ranking checks with first 4-5 pages. However, if there is a large number of keywords to control, the process may still eat a large amount of time. And here is where an automatic tool is really irreplacible! With an automated SERP monitor you can save quite a few of hours comparing to what you would spend if did that manually. However, you should stick with search engine friendly products, to exclude potential issues with your IP being blocked by Google or Yahoo.
4) Social media. Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon – all of these can be automated quite fast. However, true gems in that field are still achieved through a manual job.
5) Obtaining keyword synonyms related to your field is another job that is easy to automate. And you are really cheating yourself if you think that you don’t need any of the automated tools over there. You can keep hours of time and lose virtually nothing. There are many methods of finding good keywords and many of them can be dug through automatically.
All in all, every SEO work needs its own approach on SEO software. Some tasks are automated easily as shown above, while others still require you to apply your hands and your brain.